Cyber Crime
Cyber Crime: INTERPOL Uses Trend Threat Intelligence
INTERPOL recently conducted operation African Surge to take down malicious infrastructure across the African continent and requested the help of private enterprises. Trend Micro is proud to have been asked to participate, and provided global threat intelligence that was utilized in this operation.
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INTERPOL recently conducted operation African Surge to take down malicious infrastructure across the African continent and requested the help of private enterprises. Trend Micro is proud to have been asked to participate and provided global threat intelligence that was utilized in this operation.
To read the official announcement, please visit: https://www.interpol.int/News-and-Events/News/2022/Operation-across-Africa-identifies-cyber-criminals-and-at-risk-online-infrastructure
Trend Micro has a long history of supporting law enforcement, including INTERPOL, with our threat intelligence. From providing information about malicious actors to the threats and infrastructure used in their many attacks, our information provides valuable intelligence for their use. In this case we observed over 2,000 malicious and active servers (IP addresses) in Africa, most of which were associated with notorious botnets like Emotet and Trickbot. We also shared information on web hosting servers with malicious domains of over 6,000 IP addresses, including one country with over 36,000 detections. Our data was from 2021 through the first half of 2022 and emphasized bulletproof hosting servers. Much of the data was related to malware, scams and phishing. We also shared information on extortion spam schemes to help identify their impact across Africa, including about 84,000 detections. Trend Micro also provided our free online scanning tool, Housecall, to support people within the country to assess their systems for malware and other threats.
The Africa Cyber Surge Operation, launched in July 2022, has brought together law enforcement officials from 27 countries, working together for almost 4 months on actionable intelligence provided by INTERPOL private partners. This intelligence focused on opportunities to prevent, detect, investigate and disrupt cybercrime through coordinated LE activities utilizing INTERPOL platforms, tools, and channels. This operation focused both on cyber criminals and compromised network infrastructure in Africa, allowing member countries to identify more than 1,000 malicious IP addresses, Dark Web Markets, and individual threat actors, enhancing cooperation between INTERPOL, AFRIPOL and the member countries, and contributing to connecting policing for a safer world,” said Craig Jones, Director Cybercrime Directorate, INTERPOL.
Africa is a region we’ve been monitoring for our customers for quite a long time. We worked with INTERPOL back in 2017 to understand the budding cybercrime industry in West Africa. Trend Micro researchers have been looking into many of the cybercriminal undergrounds over the years to help us better understand how these communities operate as well as what threats are being discussed and the goods and services being offered.
“Emerging markets provide fertile grounds to plant malicious infrastructure to launch or further global cyberattacks,” said Ed Cabrera, Chief Cybersecurity Officer and former CISO of the US Secret Service. “Exponential growth in connectivity in these markets coupled with lagging legal frameworks and perceived lack of law enforcement capacity emboldens cyber threat actors.”
We are very excited to see more public-private partnerships like this that fight cybercriminals by disrupting their infrastructure and leading to arrests. The more we and our peers in the industry can help, the better we can fulfill our mission to make the world safe for exchanging digital information.
Our global threat intelligence is highly sought after due to its unmatched breadth and depth. This intelligence comes from our solutions across 500,000 commercial customers and tens of millions of consumer customers around the world. These solutions gather threat intelligence across endpoints (including mobile, PC, Mac, Servers), email, web, network traffic, IoT/IIoT, data centers and cloud infrastructures.
“Trend Micro will continue to support law enforcement around the world,” Cabrera said. “It’s not just a good idea, it’s who we are. We’re proud to have been a part of this INTERPOL operation and look forward to finding more ways to help.”